Immune System Tangets
Sep. 29th, 2020 03:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitSo I read this report from siderea and then wandered off on my own tangent, which I'm putting here and not there because it is tangential.
Autoimmune disorders have been a severe problem for a long time, and are one of the areas of medicine that very little is known about. While there certainly are male sufferers, they primarily happen in women and they're primarily thought of by the medical establishment as a women's problem. Given the *extensive* gender biases in medicine that winds up translating to not much research being done on them and not very many medical providers being conversant in them, or even willing to give you tests to prove you have them. (Assuming there *is* a test; lupus gets diagnosed basically via "you have all the symptoms and we couldn't find anything else wrong with you." There are some tests that can be indicators, but you can turn up negative on all the tests and still have lupus, and turn up positive on them and still have other things be the culprit.)
These auto-antibodies seem disproportionately to come up in men. So the question I have is whether they had prior mystery symptoms. Men are less likely to get their mystery symptoms outright dismissed by doctors than women are, but they're also less likely to seek treatment for them in the first place, and doctors are unlikely to have many answers, especially ifsiderea's surmise is correct and they have indeed discovered two previously unknown autoimmune disorders.
If COVID severity *does* turn out to be dramatically affected by whether you've got an autoimmune condition or not, then I'd point to this as a way in which the scorn for women hurts medicine for men as well: imagine how much quicker this would have been discovered if people were paying proper attention to autoimmune conditions in the first place, and doing the research involved in diagnosing and treating them so that all these people knew they had autoimmune condition X-- if you could catch this just by looking at medical history, without having to test everyone because medicine already takes such conditions seriously enough to catch them. Imagine how much further along we might be in *using* this information if anyone other than a few specialist centers cared in any way about researching autoimmune conditions.
The cynical part of me wonders if this will provoke more research into autoimmune conditions, or if they'll find out that giving interferon helps and then find reasons not to keep researching anymore, because after all it's *only* autoimmune, in much the same way I am *certain* that when the acute crisis is over all the people with long-term problems will simply be abandoned and dismissed by the medical establishment.
siderea and then wandered off on my own tangent, which I'm putting here and not there because it is tangential.Autoimmune disorders have been a severe problem for a long time, and are one of the areas of medicine that very little is known about. While there certainly are male sufferers, they primarily happen in women and they're primarily thought of by the medical establishment as a women's problem. Given the *extensive* gender biases in medicine that winds up translating to not much research being done on them and not very many medical providers being conversant in them, or even willing to give you tests to prove you have them. (Assuming there *is* a test; lupus gets diagnosed basically via "you have all the symptoms and we couldn't find anything else wrong with you." There are some tests that can be indicators, but you can turn up negative on all the tests and still have lupus, and turn up positive on them and still have other things be the culprit.)
These auto-antibodies seem disproportionately to come up in men. So the question I have is whether they had prior mystery symptoms. Men are less likely to get their mystery symptoms outright dismissed by doctors than women are, but they're also less likely to seek treatment for them in the first place, and doctors are unlikely to have many answers, especially if
siderea's surmise is correct and they have indeed discovered two previously unknown autoimmune disorders.If COVID severity *does* turn out to be dramatically affected by whether you've got an autoimmune condition or not, then I'd point to this as a way in which the scorn for women hurts medicine for men as well: imagine how much quicker this would have been discovered if people were paying proper attention to autoimmune conditions in the first place, and doing the research involved in diagnosing and treating them so that all these people knew they had autoimmune condition X-- if you could catch this just by looking at medical history, without having to test everyone because medicine already takes such conditions seriously enough to catch them. Imagine how much further along we might be in *using* this information if anyone other than a few specialist centers cared in any way about researching autoimmune conditions.
The cynical part of me wonders if this will provoke more research into autoimmune conditions, or if they'll find out that giving interferon helps and then find reasons not to keep researching anymore, because after all it's *only* autoimmune, in much the same way I am *certain* that when the acute crisis is over all the people with long-term problems will simply be abandoned and dismissed by the medical establishment.
